Liberal Mag: Melissa Harris-Perry is America’s Foremost Public Intellectual

America's foremost public intellectual

America’s foremost public intellectual

I don’t know how Melissa Harris-Perry managed to beat out Chris Hayes, Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton for this prominent title, but she deserves to be congratulated. It’s not every day that you can be named America’s foremost public intellectual by a guy who practically lives on your network.

Despite the traffic-baiting headline, Ta-Nehisi Coates spends a lot more time accusing Republicans of being super-racist than awarding Melissa-Harris-Perry her Nobel Prize for Amazing Achievements in MSNBClectualism.

A more honest name for the article subtitled “Why Melissa Harris-Perry is America’s foremost public intellectual” would be “Republicans are the most racist racists in Racistville.”

“We are into the sixth year of the era of a black president. In that time the conservative movement has gorged on a steady diet of watermelon jokes, waffle jokes, affirmative-action jokes, monkey jokes, barbecue jokes, terrorist machinations, secret Muslim plots, and dastardly Kenyan conspiracies.”

It might be a trifle more honest to say that in six years, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Melissa Harris-Perry and the good people at MSNBC have been gainfully employed accusing anyone who criticizes Obama of being a racist.

And Ta-Nehisi Coates proves my point by going on a bizarre rant accusing Mitt Romney of, what else, racism.

Romney’s familiarity with white supremacy was not passive and distant but direct and tangible. As a child he lived in a neighborhood which, by the employment of compacts, red-lining, and terrorism, was an exclusive white preserve.

Bill Clinton lives in that kind of neighborhood today. So does much of the liberal elite. But shh, we’re not supposed to discuss that.

From there Ta-Nehisi Coates begins accusing Mormons of racism and Melissa Harris-Perry of being a genius.

The problem was making any kind of light of a fraught subject—a black child being reared by a family whose essential beliefs were directly shaped by white supremacy, whose patriarch sought to lead a movement which derives most its energy from white supremacy. That’s a weighty subtext. But there is no one more worthy, and more capable, of holding that conversation than America’s most foremost public intellectual—Melissa Harris-Perry.

And no channel more worthy to host a laugh session about that conversation than MSNBC.

There may well be intellectuals with more insight. And there are surely public figures with a greater audience. But there is no one who communicates the work of thinking to more people with more rigor and effect than Harris-Perry.

More people? Has Ta-Nehisi Coates seen MSNBC’s ratings?

Her show brings a broad audience into a classroom without using dead academic language and tortured abstractions.

No, she does it by mocking a Republican family for having a black grandson. No dead academic language or abstractions there.

  • A Z

    “But there is no one who communicates the work of thinking”

    Anyone, who talks or writes like Ta-Nehisi Coates did in uttering the above phrase, would have to vote Democrat.

    • truebearing

      Tahiti Coates is trying to get more air time with the airhead. Either that, or he thinks the formula for becoming an intellectual giant like Perry is to maintain strict incoherence.

      • A Z

        Coates is a senior editor for the Atlantic Magazine. It is mind blowing that the Atlantic would have an editor with such writing skills. I know my own writing skills are not much (I have a penchant for dangling prepositions to list one bad grammar habit), but I am also not a senior editor for a major magazine. I thought of the Atlantic as being in a rank just below Time , Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. I assumed that it tilted left like most publication unless they are known to be right of center, but Coates’s work is complete drivel!

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta-Nehisi_Coates

        “But there is no one who communicates the work of thinking”
        That particular phrase shows poor writing skills, poor critical thinking and a poor grasp on reality.

        I think the fictional character Niki in weakly scripted “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone” spoke more eloquently when she used the term “brainsweat”.

        • truebearing

          Our media has abandoned integrity, honesty, and talent for goose stepping complicity in the political agenda of the Left. They have no standards, just an obsessive desire to stay relevant in their movement by serving those in power. If it is determined that a moron should be given a prestigious job because he’s black, it will be done, in accordance with political correctness. Apparently the majority of Americans thought the same way in 2008 and 2012…and we ended up with the same result.

        • Daniel Greenfield

          It’s a specific style really. Obama uses it too. Secularized fake preacher talk with buzzwords piled on top.

        • Race_Dissident

          Behold the fruits of “affirmative” action.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      For him thinking really is hard work.

    • rubber stamp

      “the work of thinking” – that’s deep stuff. and true. Libs have to go through some serious struggle, or work it hard, to produce the next race-crazed thought,

      • J.

        Lol. I think it takes a lot more to deny common sense truths, but once their brain has been seared and washed, then it’s a no brainier for them deny basic economics, or to be logically fallacious in their rhetoric. You could even say the media does the thinking for them.

  • Hass

    “As a child Romney lived in a neighborhood which, by the employment of compacts, red-lining, and terrorism, was an exclusive white preserve.”

    And so what?

    • James Mayer

      Exactly! But note the implication – white people living in their own neighbourhoods is “wrong”. THAT’S racist. Against us. But that’s OK too, huh? What we are dealing with here is envy: our enemies are not only determined to undermine the political power our grandparents fought and died to earn, but actually seek to prevent us from retaining any sense of our own identity as well. They are, in fact, racists…

    • glpage

      I wonder how terrorism was used to maintain that white preserve.

      • ZZ

        Golf? Polka music? Nascar?

      • Hass

        Only a LibTurd can explain that idiotic reasoning.

  • truebearing

    “But there is no one more worthy, and more capable, of holding that conversation than America’s most foremost public intellectual—Melissa Harris-Perry.”

    No wonder the nation is swirling around the drain. I guess that is why I prefer private intellectuals, which are all of those who don’t make complete fools of themselves every time they speak.

    ““We are into the sixth year of the era of a black president. In that time the conservative movement has gorged on a steady diet of watermelon jokes, waffle jokes, affirmative-action jokes, monkey jokes, barbecue jokes, terrorist machinations, secret Muslim plots, and dastardly Kenyan conspiracies.”

    Anyone know what is Obama’s favorite meal? Chateau Briard. Ta-Nehisi forgot dog-eating jokes.

  • mackykam

    Affirmative action intellectual, that is. Besides, what’s with those tampon earrings? Did they come with instructions , like insert here, and she misread the instructions?

    • A Z

      I noticed the earing were “off” somehow, but put it out of my mind, since almost everything people like Melissa Perry believes or says is objectionally wrong.

      However since you pointed it out, it seems that I am not going down as rabbit hole of insanity, but being sucked into a massive black hole of insanity against my will. These liberals are everywhere and there are sick.

      It is not that Perry is different. I deal with people from different cultures all the time. I am married to a foreigner from a non-western culture.What I recognizes as being sick pr perverted my spouse from a non Western, non-Abrahamic tradition also recognizes as sick and perverted.

      So there must be something to the fact that Melissa is a sick, twisted person.

      • mackykam

        Her problem stems from her black half detesting her white half, while her white half despises her black half for being only half as good.

        • James Mayer

          Harsh.

          • Race_Dissident

            The truth often is.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      She was supporting something too stupid for words.

  • patrick

    I had thought TNC was smarter than that and a better writer to boot. This woman, (who was skeptical that radical Islam was relevant to the Boston bombings) is smarter than, say, Donald Kagan or Walter McDougall? Really?

  • rubber stamp

    “Her show brings a broad.” Period!

  • y3524m

    the really sad part about the subject matter and the motivation behind it is that the left could care less of what the leftists are saying. They are simply goading the non-leftists into analysis and commentary in the hopes of engaging us in this lurid discussion of ‘who is more stupid’, us or them.

    If we ignore it, like the ratings have suggested their own leftist audience has, then their ratings will drop further until such point that even the stupid money pulls out of their support base.

  • motherofbeaver

    In the culturally, socially, and morally debased world we now live in, where Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke are the modern day version of “Fred and Ginger”, it is entirely fitting for an idiot like Melissa Harris-Perry to be considered our greatest intellect.

  • Habbgun

    Striking how similar the “black” Perry is to left wing “Jews”. She pretends to talk for a group because she has some superficial racial similarities but she is only where she is because of who her parents were and that she has the right white European views straight up.Give people like her another generation or two and they’ll be saying “As a black person I am ashamed about such and such”. Give another generation and they’ll sound like “anti-zionist” Jews only they’ll be saying I am against black neighborhoods that don’t conform to world opinion on accepting government health care, violent Islamists, etc..

    I’m also curious whether she would have been joking like that if the baby was lighter. I doubt it. It would look more like Obama and his mother.

  • Gee

    Didn’t Odumba attend a church for 20 years where the preacher screamed “Kill Whitey”? Just because of living in a neighborhood a man is guilty – but the man that attended a racist church is some sort of saint?

    Very weird indeed – MSNBC must employ nothing but racist morons

  • glpage

    I kind of thought that thinking was something that just naturally occurred as I wandered around in life. I observe something, it registers in my mind, and then the ol’ brain kind of figures it out. If thinking is work for Ta-Nehisi Coates I feel sorry for him. Well, maybe not. Maybe he needs to consider that using big words in long sentences while he is blathering on about leftist talking points and total nonsense does not make him an intellectual.

  • ZZ

    “Most foremost?” Coates is an even bigger ninny than Harris-Perry. And isn’t miss tampon earrings the dingbat who said our children belong to the state? What kind of confused racist puts her hair into fake corn rows to try and look authentically Black when she is obviously more than half White? Who hired the MSNBC lineup? Obama? They are all the worst people possible for their jobs. Sure, they’re raging leftwing ideologues as MSNBC demands, but they’re also talentless and unhinged laughingstocks who are detested by most of the people who are aware they exist.

    I suppose it’s true what they say: “Intellectual” means educated moron.